Alaska Trip, Day 5: Rafting Down a Shallow River
We met our tour guide in front of the boat, an impossibly nice woman with a smile both constant and utterly sincere. She piled us into a minivan and drove us inland to the sandy shore of a river where a rubber raft was waiting, beside eight pairs of knee-high rubber boots, a bag of rain gear, and the stolid-looking guide — Victor — who would row us downstream.
Although “row” turned out to be kind a misnomer. The river was in a shallow mood, and the flow of water often petered out into tiny ponds surrounded by narrow shores of gravel. When this happened, our guide would use his oar as a lever, dragging us over drifts and sandbars with a lovely combination of finesse and brute strength. Sometimes he asked us to get out and help him push. Other times we disembarked and walked along the gravelbed, while he dragged the boat along whatever circuitous route the anemic waterway was wandering.
After we got past the shallows, we floated down the river in the traditional way: athwart the current, our boat perpendicular to the shore, Victor using his oar as a rudder rather than a propellant, navigating us around deadfalls and through rapids and down narrow corridors of silt and rock. We’d come to see eagles, and they were everywhere — walking along the dry surface of the lake and perched in the naked branches of dying trees and flying overhead. So many, in fact, that they sort of became a commonplace, and my attention turned to the landscape: the scale of it, the quiet, boundless power. Long flat planes of water hemmed in by green walls of trees. Eagles soaring overhead. It takes your breath away, and makes you feel insignificant and exalted at the same time.
Now: I am, above all things, a soft and foppish creature of the suburbs. My basic attitude toward the natural world is fairly straightforward: it must be avoided, at all costs, because everything in it wants to kill me, as quickly and savagely as possible. I distrust the strange realm on the other side of my office window, with its bugs and its strange unpredictable temperatures and its ugly tendency to spit water from the sky.
Nevertheless — this trip was a complete and utter blast. I’m not at one with nature or anything, but for those two hours on the river me and nature were more or less on speaking terms, for the first time in a long time. I understand now, a little, what makes people fall in love with this murderous, ubiquitous, beautiful everywhere.
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